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A Sinner Saved by Grace
by Michael Haslam
Michael Haslam describes his new collection as 'the second verse' of The Music Laid Her Songs in Language (Arc, 2001), of which the critic Robert Potts wrote in the Guardian when describing essential reading in 2001: "I haven't read anything that sounds as beautiful as this for years..."
The title, A Sinner Saved by Grace, comes from the inscription on a lonely and isolated gravestone the poet came across while walking on the moors above his home in the Calder Valley. And indeed, the whole collection is a reaffirmation of the powers of nature, language and music by which the poet finds himself surrounded in his Pennine home.
...a very distinctive sound... Roll the syllables around your tongue, and they have a musical mellifluence that is rare in English poetry. ...they help you hear the words as melodies and harmonies as well as sentences that make sense. ...a poet of the Northern landscape and townscape, visionary and exact. ...beautiful poems that make you think.
Haslam is an original... disarming surges of honesty, and imagery, which unravel at a speed that is hard to track. ...a unique suppleness of language, discouraging linear interpretation.
[Haslam is] a poet whose lines are consciously overlayered, and whose poems solicit lexical reflection and even research. They are in a tradition of modern poetry which takes the extra dimension of the printed page to be the natural ground of attention to detail.
Paperback
82 pages
ISBN 1-904614-16-7
Published January 2005
